US will boost its cyber arsenal

The Pentagon's advanced research arm said it is boosting efforts to build offensive cyber arms for possible keyboard-launched U.S. military attacks against enemy targets.

The military needs "more and better options" to meet cyber threats to a growing range of industrial and other systems controlled by computers vulnerable to penetration, including cars, said Regina Dugan, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "Modern warfare will demand the effective use of cyber, kinetic and combined cyber and kinetic means," she said. Kinetic is military parlance for traditional ways of fighting such as dropping bombs, firing missiles and rolling tanks in. Dugan's agency, known as DARPA, opened the session to what it called "visionary hackers" as well as academics and others in an effort to "change the dynamic of cyber defense" amid mounting U.S. concern over vulnerabilities of networks and computer-controlled hardware.